RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last Friday, the British Labour Party introduced an “assisted dying” bill into parliament. The following day, in an attempt to demonstrate that they stood squarely behind the measure, the party’s members elected Jeremy Corbyn as their new leader.

Since 1974, Labour has won only three elections — all of them under the moderate stewardship of Tony Blair. By selecting a rabble-rousing socialist to lead it into the future, the British Left has sent a clear message to the public at large. That message? That it is happy to lose in perpetuity if it can moan and emote along the way. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell worried aloud that his coveted socialist agenda would never be realized if its implementation were to remain in the hands of the “prigs.” “It would help enormously,” Orwell concluded, “if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled.” “If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly,” then — and only then — would the Left have a shot at power. Combining the mien of a burned-out geography teacher at a third-rate comprehensive school with the speaking style of a self-satisfied undergraduate Trotskyite, Jeremy Corbyn is precisely the kind of socialist Orwell feared. One can only imagine how he’d suffer if he were alive to watch his rise.

Lest anyone unfamiliar with British politics get the wrong impression, it might help to understand that when Corbyn’s critics suggest that he is an “extremist” within the British political firmament, they mean it quite literally. Many is the Englishman who has described himself as a “little bit of a lefty,” but rare is the man who is happy to be known as a “Red.” Corbyn, alas, is that rare man.

If he were to become prime minister, Corbyn says he would aim to rid Britain of its nuclear arsenal, to withdraw the country from NATO, and to throw open the UK’s borders to all and sundry. As a matter of priority, he hopes to renationalize the railways and, possibly, the utility companies; to raise the top rate of tax above 50 percent; and to encourage the Bank of England to print vast amounts of money in order to fund whatever “infrastructure” projects he happens to prefer. Providing that they have the right enemies (America, Britain, Western civilization, etc.), he will strike nobody from his Christmas-card list. Over the last few decades, the new head of the British Left has been a defender of the Irish Republican Army, of both Hezbollah and Hamas, and of an assorted array of anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. Frankly, Labour may as well have handed the donkey-jacket wearing denizens of Occupy Westminster the keys to its future.

Explaining what it would take to win over the public, Orwell recommended that the “more intransigent kind of Socialist has now got to ally himself with people who are not in perfect agreement with him.” There is little evidence that Jeremy Corbyn is even remotely capable of this. As the Guardian reported back in 1999, the man is so unflinchingly doctrinaire in his thinking that he divorced his second wife, Claudia, because she disagreed with him about which sort of state-run school would be best for their kids. Politics is a funny business, and Harold McMillan’s famous injunction to heed “events, dear boy, events” is timelessly, ubiquitously relevant. But, absent an apocalypse or a total economic meltdown, Jeremy Corbyn is likely to end up as more of a protest candidate than a serious contender for office. After fifty years of watching the patterns, we know what sort of person leads the Labour party to defeat. Sorry, Mr. Orwell; it’s happening again.

#share#To understand why the practical wing of the Labour party is in such a flat panic, we might compare its present predicament with that of America’s Republicans. Superficially, at least, there are some obvious parallels between the two. As the media figures it, both parties “lost” the last two general elections, and in neither case did being kicked out of office prompt a serious stab at modernization; both parties have been gravely damaged by the Iraq War, to the extent that neither wants to embrace — or even mention — its last successful national leader; and both parties have seen a populist faction grow within them — in Labour’s case, this has led to the election of Jeremy Corbyn, and for the Republicans it has led to the rise of Donald Trump.

Practically speaking, though, that is about as far as it goes. Indeed, whatever one might say about the GOP’s occasional penchant for ideological purity, it is at present sitting rather pretty. Given the importance of executive power, that the Republicans have failed twice in a row to win the White House is a headache, certainly. But, when one looks at the scene in toto, the party is hardly in historical dire straits. In fact, as Jeff Greenfield observed recently in Politico, Barack Obama is set to “leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression — even if Hillary wins.” No president “in modern times,” Greenfield submits, “has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.” Since Obama was inaugurated in 2008, Larry Sabato notes, the Democrats have “lost 11 governorships, 13 U.S. Senate seats, 69 House seats, and 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers.” In every area except for the White House, the GOP is ascendant. And if a Republican candidate were to win the presidency in 2016? Well, then the Democrats would be left with pretty much nothing.

Is the same true of Labour? Not on your life. Forget the disastrous body blow that the general electorate dealt the party earlier in the year, and observe instead its decline within the other levels of government. Back in 1997, Labour controlled 47 percent of British local councils — ten times as many as the Tories (4.7 percent). Today, the Conservatives are in charge of a whopping 58 percent of those bodies, while Labour holds just 25 percent of them. In the European parliament, meanwhile, Labour controls just 27 percent of the UK’s seats, while UKIP and the Conservative party sit in nearly six of every ten. And in London — which was once a staunchly left-leaning city — voters have elected a Conservative as mayor twice in the last seven years.

When Tony Blair and David Miliband warn that a Labour party fronted by Jeremy Corbyn is “walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below” — and that it risks being “annihilated” as a result — they are not doing so from a position of strength. Rather, they are fighting for the very survival of their movement. Given the manner in which the pendulum tends to swing, Labour looked a few months ago as if it had hit its inevitable nadir and would start soon to inch back in to national favor. That, though, was before the party faithful began to advocate jumping off the cliff, the better to hit the crags below.

Let the assisted suicide begin in earnest.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.